Jimmy Santiago Baca's Poetry

In the essay “Coming into Language”, the author Jimmy Santiago Baca expresses how he used reading and writing as an escape to his reality. He begins by talking about his first engagement with books during his night shifts at the hospital where he was working. During this time, Baca would only look at the pictures in books because he didn’t know how to read. He found a book on Chicano history and found his true identity. It was from then on that Baca found he felt free reading and expressing himself on paper. When he first went to prison at the age of seventeen and heard the inmates reading aloud together is when he ironically said, “Never had I felt such freedom as in that dormitory.” (Baca, 1992, pg52) This quote is an example of Baca feeling

Jimmy Santiago Baca’s poem “Oppression” discusses the importance of remaining emotionally and mentally strong when enduring oppression. For those suffering from the emotional trauma of being held captive illegally, singing is one solution a poet offers to those who are oppressed as he states, “Look deep to find the grains of hope and strength,/ and sing, my brothers and sisters” (Baca 6-7). Singing is an act that a person can generally freely participate in, which is why Baca suggests it since it is a small symbol of retaliation against the oppressors. Even though captors may rob a person of his physical freedom, the person can still show self-control by choosing to make the best of the situation by singing to uplift his emotional state. In

As a person who came from another country to the USA. learning how to read and write wasn’t easy. At the beginning, I found it so hard to read and write I would sit for a long time trying to read one page and most of the time I didn’t understand what was it about. writing one complete sentence was very difficult I had to learn read and write for that reason I feel that I have a lot of similarity with Jimmy Santiago who also had a hard time reading and writing and he had to teach himself how to read and write. I have a lot of similarity with Jimmy Santiago Baca. Jimmy Santiago was born in poor Mexican Family.His dad was addicted to alcohol and his Mom left him when he was a kid because of the financial problem they were facing and married a rich man. Regardless the struggles that Jimmy Santiago Baca faced he was able to cope with them by teaching himself how to write poems. Jimmy found a place for him in the community and he felt that by writing poems he was able to connect with people. He found a place to stand. A place that he was always searching for and he mentioned that in his book,“ A Place to Stand The Making of a poet.” by saying,“I was searching for something to make me feel more a part of the world, I couldn’t share with anyone the pain that still drove my exploration to find a place to stand comfortably in my skin.”, also, he was able to get rid of his anger that he was born with wrong skin color. reading, writing, and becoming a poet helped Jimmy Santiago get

In "Coming Into Language," Jimmy Santiago Baca describes how he went from being illiterate to learning how to read and write and eventually becoming a poet while being in prison. From being embarrassed for not understanding and asking questions Baca become illiterate, and in ninth grade he decided to drop out. The only thing that seemed to interest him was books with pictures of people of the same nationality as him. When listening to prisoners talk in “ Chicano language” out loud it had inspired him to learn his own language. In this narrative Baca explains to us that becoming a writer helped him through tough years when he was an inmate.

This dehumanization can be felt within many global communities today and continues to destroy the well-being of many individuals. Whether this freedom of speech is denied due to poverty or overbearing authority, it provokes a widespread sense of insecurity and vulnerability. This emotional instability is expressed in the autobiography “Coming into Language,” where Jimmy Santiago Baca reveals the hardships of his poverty-stricken childhood. Growing up in an orphanage and later living on the streets, Baca did not have access to a viable education or support system, and eventually dropped out of school. This abandonment of education was due to educators focusing on Baca’s deficiencies opposed to his potential, and creating an environment where

The article, Jimmy Santiago Baca: Poetry as Lifesavor retells the challenges and hardships Baca experienced. Rob Baker, the author, informs the readers that past experiences will continually influence decisions in the future. In the beginning it is revealed that the characters parrents abandoned him at the young age of seven. His troubles only worsened as time went on for he dropped out of junior high, due to not performing well academically and socially. Therefore, he fell into the wrong crowds and was eventually sentenced to prison for five to ten years, at the age of twenty-one. Poety helped him to overcome the mental and emotional impact that prison imparts with the individual. Baca now uses his experiences to reach out to the community by becoming a teacher to encourage children to embrace their own stories.

In A Place to Stand, Jimmy Santiago Baca introduces the readers to his life, providing many details from his past that allow the readers to understand his present. Throughout the novel, Baca finds himself in the midst of violence where ultimately, these instances lead to a common theme of abuse. The physical and mental abuse that Baca endures throughout his childhood plays an important part in shaping Baca’s entire life. Furthermore, the abuse that Baca suffers inflicted by his father, his mother, and his ex-girlfriend, negatively affects his future life and point him towards crime and distrust in people around him.

Jimmy Santiago Baca is a prime example of the impact that can be extracted from a strong and caring passion towards an education. Baca was passionate in learning how to read when he was in prison, and he eventually achieved that goal. With his passion fueling his career, Baca would go on to become a poet, writer, and education activists for diverse classrooms. Baca is fueled by improving the conditions of those who feel like they have hit rock bottom like he once was. Several books were written from Baca’s backstory in hopes that people would learn from his mistakes and lessons learned within his lifetime. One of the subject areas that Baca has spent a good amount of his life promoting and discussing is the importance of education. Baca wrote a collection of stories that showed his experiences where people attempted to keep him down, but Baca’s drive to continue to expand and learn prevented him from staying down. This collection of stories is called “Stories from the Edge,” and Baca decided to add something extra with this book. He decided to go into a classroom with diverse students and he shared his stories from the book in greater detail. There were open discussions with the students about how his stories related to the students lives. After the student group left, Baca met with the teachers that aided with the student interaction, and they discussed the teaching methods that fuel the students motivation to learn. Jimmy Baca clearly is passionate in aiding individuals

Born in 1952 in Santa Fe of Chicano and Apache descent, Jimmy Santiago Baca was abandoned by his parents at the age of 13 years old, he got placed in an orphanage by his grandmother which he ran away from as soon as possible. He was convicted on drug charges in 1973 and has spent five years in prison. While he served prison he learned to read and began writing poetry. Jimmy Baca recaptures his life and his struggles in A Place to Stand. When Jimmy was young he saw his father go to jail, addicted to alcohol, a mother that abandoned him for another man, and siblings broken apart mentally. This story explores the idea that no matter what background you come from you can rise above it and overcome any obstacle. Also, the environment in

Poetry has a role in society, not only to serve as part of the aesthetics or of the arts. It also gives us a view of what the society is in the context of when it was written and what the author is trying to express through words. The words as a tool in poetry may seem ordinary when used in ordinary circumstance. Yet, these words can hold more emotion and thought, however brief it was presented.

Perez’s use figurative language throughout the poem transmits the concept of avarice in mankind with the ambition for amelioration. A representation of similes in the poem would be “Darkness spills across the sky like an oil plume.” In the literal sense, he is stating that it is nighttime which creates the setting of the poem. However, when referring to oil plumes, Perez is discussing the environmental damages such as destroying habitats and the source of diseases

Ted hughes uses literary techniques in the most vivid way, to illustrate what his idea of a water lily painting looked like. In all of his works, the goal is to describe a task or a thing, but make the reader understand it by using nature as the key. The task in this poem is presented by the title “How To Paint A Water Lily”. The reason he wrote this poem, was to describe nature by decorating the spirit of the environment around the lily. The two literary techniques that will be discussed in this paper are imagery and alliteration.

The author starts by explaining Baca’s background he tells the audience the difficult circumstances that were Baca’s life. All circumstances considered into his young adulthood Baca could hardly read nor write and truly had no desire to learn; Which makes it even more spectacular that he found poetry. His interest began at twenty-one when Baca was in prison, sentenced to possibly five to ten years. A couple years passed and a church program had extended a relationship via a letter they sent, they targeted prisoners without families. Unbeknownst Baca learned through steady communication with the church how to read and write. The writing gave him something to do and in a sense a purpose. Shortly into their connection, the man from the church introduced to a friend who was a poet. After this moment Baca’s life would never be the same. “I believe something in my brain or

Style is the special way an author creates his or her work. Gabriela Mistral exploits an informal style in her poem “Ballad”. The poem discusses the poets feelings and is written in first person point of view validating its informality; “My heart’s blood.”-Line17 using ‘my’ and describing her heart confirm this. Diction contributes to style in an extensive way. Repetition is a form of diction that is heavily spread out through the poem. “Saw him pass by.”-Lines 2/6, “He goes loving.../...in bloom”-Lines1-2/11-12, and “He will go.../through eternity.”-Lines 19-20/23-24. The repetition emphasizes the authors style an diction. In this poem diction is displayed through negative connotation. Choosing to describe her emotional state as “,wretched,”-Line 5, instead of sad or unhappy, and by adding a

At the mere age of seventeen, Pablo Neruda wrote ’Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair’ and it has since become one of his most famous collection of poems. Once, in an interview, Neruda stated that he could not understand “why this book, a book of love-sadness, of love-pain, continues to be read by so many people, by so many young people” (Guibert, 2015). He also mentioned that “Perhaps this book represents the youthful posing of many enigmas; perhaps it represents the answers to those enigmas.” (Guibert, 2015). Neruda was one of the first poets to explore sexual imagery and eroticism in his work and become accepted for it. Many Latin-American poets had attempted the same, but failed to become popular with their critics. He merges his own experiences and memories with that of the picturesque Chilean scenery to present a beautifully poetic sense of love and sexual desire. The collection hosts quite a controversial opinion, however, amongst critics and readers alike, with the risqué themes running throughout the poems. Eroticism being one of the most evident and reoccurring themes.